Corporate law departments and claims departments of insurance companies (collectively, “companies” or “clients”) have used matter management systems to track information about legal matters and projects (collectively, “matters”). For example, such systems may be used to store a list of people involved in a matter, a schedule for a matter, a budget for a matter, a list of actions taken with respect to the matter, a set of documents relating to the matter, etc. One of the major weaknesses of these systems is that information about these matters can be inaccurately entered by its providers. Because the type of information contained in these matter management systems can be critical (e.g., estimates of potential liability which must be disclosed in certain situations), inaccurate information will result in unreliable reports about the matters and can also lead to other problems such as a failure to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley rules and other regulatory requirements.
One of the reasons that matter information may not be accurate is that many matter management systems have a set of fields that must be completed to create a matter on the system or that a third party such as a law firm is required to complete before beginning work on a project (“required fields”), but some or all of the information necessary to complete the required fields is not immediately available and may not be known or reasonably provided until weeks or even months after the matter has commenced. An example of this type of information includes potential liability probabilities and estimates for a litigated matter. (E.g., Financial Accounting Standard 5 establishes rules about when companies are required to recognize the potential loss contingency in the financial statements and disclose the existence of the potential suit to shareholders.) If there has not been a reasonable opportunity to investigate the facts or the law affecting the litigation, this potential liability information is not available or determinable. Consequently, if a user does not have all of the information necessary to complete the required fields when creating or setting up a matter, that user will have a “Catch-22” decision to either enter inaccurate or “dummy” information, or not create or setup the matter. If the user decides to enter inaccurate or “dummy” information, the user may forget or be too busy to go back into the system and correct the inaccurate or “dummy” information. If, on the other hand, the user decides not to create or set up the matter, then the matter management system cannot be immediately used for the matter.
An alternative to the required field approach is to make the entry of data in the matter fields not mandatory (an “optional field”); in other words, the user can save the matter form without having entered any value in the field. If the field is optional, it can eliminate the problem of a user entering inaccurate or “dummy” data when creating a matter. However, this solution is also often not satisfactory, because in many situations a blank field is as inaccurate as “dummy” information. Just like with required fields, if the user forgets or is to busy to go back into the system and enter the correct information in the optional field, information will never be entered and the system will have inaccurate data.
Another approach would be to make the field optional, but change the field to a required field at a later point in time; in other words, the user can initially create or setup the matter without having filled in any information in the optional field, but then later after the field becomes required, if the user tries to edit or provide any information in the matter fields, the system will not allow the user to save the matter field form without the recently-required field to be completed. This approach, although preferable to the prior two approaches described above, is also not satisfactory because if there is no need to re-edit the matter information in the future, the form never needs to be resaved. Thus, this delay in making the field required does not ensure that the data will ultimately be provided into the field.
Finally, a system could use an alerting system to remind a responsible person to enter information in required fields that are incomplete, but the alerting system may not be a sufficient incentive to cause the person to enter the desired information in the fields. For example, if the system sends an email reminder, the user can simply ignore or delete the email message without entering information in the required fields that are incomplete.
The problems described above can also exist in situations where a user who is not responsible for managing the matter initially creates the matter in the system for the person who is responsible for the matter. For example, a secretary of an attorney may be responsible for initially creating the matter for a company, or entering data for a law firm to setup the matter, but the secretary may not know or have access to all of the information necessary to complete the required fields of matter information. What the secretary would like to do is fill in the information available to the secretary at the time of saving the form, and then have the attorney fill in the remaining matter information later. This situation involving a secretary and an attorney, however, raises all of the same problems described above. If all of the fields are required fields, the secretary must enter “dummy” information or not provide any information. Alternatively, if the secretary has the option of leaving the fields blank, then the in-house attorney may fail to later enter the important matter information, so the fields are always blank.
Accordingly, a software facility that overcame some or all of the aforementioned shortcomings relating to the accurateness of information in a matter management or project management system would have significant utility to corporate law departments, claims departments of insurance companies, and other entities managing projects such as law firms.